| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Hated Son by Honore de Balzac: clap.
"Listen to me," he said in his strongest voice, "and remember my
words. I will never see or hear the little monster you hold in your
arms. He is your child, and not mine; there is nothing of me in him.
Hide him, I say, hide him from my sight, or--"
"Just God!" cried the countess, "protect us!"
"Silence!" said her husband. "If you do not wish me to throttle him,
see that I never find him in my way."
"Then," said the countess gathering strength to oppose her tyrant,
"swear to me that if you never meet him you will do nothing to injure
him. Can I trust your word as a nobleman for that?"
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from An Episode Under the Terror by Honore de Balzac: door of the lodging in the attic she stopped and tapped mysteriously;
an old man brought forward a chair for her. She dropped into it at
once.
"Hide! hide!" she exclaimed, looking up at him. "Seldom as we leave
the house, everything that we do is known, and every step is
watched----"
"What is it now?" asked another elderly woman, sitting by the fire.
"The man that has been prowling about the house yesterday and to-day,
followed me to-night----"
At those words all three dwellers in the wretched den looked in each
other's faces and did not try to dissimulate the profound dread that
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Black Beauty by Anna Sewell: "I'm your man, gentlemen! take my cab, my horse will get you there
all right;" and as he shut them in, with a wink toward Jerry, said,
"It's against his conscience to go beyond a jog-trot."
Then slashing his jaded horse, he set off as hard as he could.
Jerry patted me on the neck: "No, Jack, a shilling would not pay
for that sort of thing, would it, old boy?"
Although Jerry was determinedly set against hard driving,
to please careless people, he always went a good fair pace,
and was not against putting on the steam, as he said, if only he knew why.
I well remember one morning, as we were on the stand waiting for a fare,
that a young man, carrying a heavy portmanteau, trod on a piece
|
The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: evil; his morals had been corrupted by a licentious court, a
reflection worthy of the Duke of Urbino crossed his mind, and it
was a keen sense of curiosity that goaded him into boldness. The
devil himself might have whispered the words that were echoing
through his brain, Moisten one of the eyes with the liquid! He
took up a linen cloth, moistened it sparingly with the precious
fluid, and passed it lightly over the right eyelid of the corpse.
The eye unclosed. . . .
"Aha!" said Don Juan. He gripped the flask tightly, as we clutch
in dreams the branch from which we hang suspended over a
precipice.
|
